Arcen Games has announced an update for Tidalis. The block based puzzle game challenges players to link chains of like colored blocks to clear the way for more blocks falling from the top of the screen. The update introduces improvements from Unity 3.1, improved graphics, and the addition of a second keyboard player. Arcen has also released Tidalis Lite, a free web based version of the game.

This release doesn't include any new content, but it really improves the game in general. The biggest change here is an upgrade of the Unity 3D engine (which powers Tidalis) from version 2.6 to version 3.1. The number of improvements in the Unity engine between those two versions is nothing short of staggering, and that alone fixes the unable-to-set-screen-resolution issues on OSX, as well as making performance better in general. It also resolved some annoying font wrapping issues that were caused by the Unity 2.6 engine.

Going along with that, for AI War 4.0 we had to develop out a new, higher-performance rendering pipeline to go on top of the Unity engine; the rendering pipeline we'd been using in Tidalis just wasn't nearly fast enough to handle AI War. Tidalis is a much lighter-weight game visually compared to AI War, but even so we've backported the new pipeline from AI War to Tidalis, and the result is a puzzle game that runs even smoother, and which will run well on even slower hardware. Great news for netbooks and older laptops.

Another huge mechanics addition is the addition of a second keyboard player. Previously, Tidalis supported one mouse player and one keyboard player. Now it supports one mouse player and up to two keyboard players, all on one computer. This is particularly useful for those players who are mapping gamepads to the keyboard keys. It also increases the game from being up to 2 player local (6 player online) to being 3 payer local (6 player online), although it's still a maximum of two actual game boards in local or online play.